


the possible impossible things

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, yes this is a semi spin off of mountain in colorado
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 13:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18316382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: An AU where Melissa is alive.





	the possible impossible things

**1.** They slip it under her door one night, the photograph skating over her rug that she uses to cover up her sister’s bloodstains on the floorboards.

Scully is half-asleep on the couch when it happens, accidentally curled against Mulder who has his hand tangled in her chopped hair and a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead and the mostly-healed wounds beneath his hairline. She stirs when she hears the footsteps though, sees the photograph nestled in the fabric of her rug, and her first thought is of the keycard Fowley slid under her door. She’s on her feet in a minute, rushing across the room and wrenching the door open. The hall is empty; she steps back into it, whipping her head back and forth desperately, but she sees nobody. “Hey!” she shouts, demanding, and it echoes off the wall. But nobody is there.

“Scully?” She turns to see Mulder standing up by her couch, his eyes sleepy and confused. “What’s going on?” he asks.

She sighs, her shoulders tight. “Someone slipped something under my door,” she says, bending down to retrieve it as she steps into the apartment.

“Seriously?” Mulder asks, moving closer to her. “What is it?”

He cranes his neck to see, but she is unable to answer him. She’s frozen in place, her eyes glued on the photograph, on the impossible image there. In the picture is Melissa, her hair longer than Scully has ever seen it, pale and thin and wearing a hospital gown. She’s curled in a protective position on the bed, her eyes fierce, flipping off the camera. Most visible is the scar, the small, round scar nearly hidden by the fall of her hair.

Glaring is the timestamp at the bottom. The date that reads  _October 3, 1999_.

Scully sways on her feet, feeling faint, not able to answer Mulder’s questions. It’s impossible. It’s fucking impossible, but here it is, and she wants so badly for it to be real. But it’s  _impossible_.

There is an address scrawled on the back of the photo.

 **2.**  Mulder is nearly as astounded as he is when he sees the photo. But the odd thing is that he seems to believe it.

“We’ve seen things like this faked before, Mulder,” she says softly. Her eyes are wet, welling up, and she blinks hard, looks away from that picture of her sister that cannot possibly be her. “Faked photographs… people we’ve mistaken for other people…”

“We’ve also seen these people fake a death,” Mulder says gently. He’s sitting right at her side, a comforting hand on her knee, another at her back. “We’ve seen a million different tricks and lies… who’s to say that Melissa’s death wasn’t a lie?”

“Who’s to say that this  _picture_  wasn’t a lie?” Scully nearly snaps. “This is impossible, Mulder!”

“How many impossible things have we seen?” Mulder whispers, his thumb stroking her kneecap.

Scully sniffles, shutting her eyes tight. She’s thinking of her sister’s funeral, the mahogany coffin and the flowers, the picture of herself and Melissa she has on the mantle. She deeply wants her sister to be alive, but she’s terrified of the idea that it won’t be true. “I saw her…” she stammers. “I  _buried_  her. We buried her, Mulder…”

“I know. I know.” He wraps his arms around her, pulling her into his chest. She muffles a sob with one hand, pressing her face into his chest. “It’s okay,” he whispers, stroking her hair.

She bites back more sobs, clutching a handful of his shirt. “If… if Missy really was alive,” she murmurs, “why would somebody tell me? What’s the motive for that?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t.”

“This is probably a trap, Mulder. They’re probably trying to get to me, or to you, and we’re walking right into it… Melissa probably isn’t even  _alive_.” Saying it feels like a fucking betrayal, but she doesn’t want to let herself believe it because if it isn’t true, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. She shakes her head as if she can make it go away.

“Scully, listen. Listen to me.” He tucks a finger under her chin and tips it upwards so she’s looking at him. Wipes her tears away, presses a hand to her cheek. “If you don’t want to follow this lead,” he says solemnly, “I’ll understand. But, Scully… there’s a possibility that your sister might be alive. I think that possibility alone is worth pursuing.”

There’s an undercurrent of pain in his voice, small but enough to remind her that she’s not the only one who has lost a sister. She chews her lower lip, wipes her eyes again and looks back down at the picture. It’s painful to look at, to see Melissa looking so weak, but it looks like  _her_. It doesn’t look like a fake.

Looking at the picture is enough to convince her that she needs to do it. That she can’t  _not_  do it. Missy is her sister, and she’s already failed her once, and she won’t fail her again. Not after everything that has happened. If there’s any chance that Missy is okay, has been alive all this time and has been kept captive somewhere, then she has to go. She doesn’t have a choice.

She sniffles again, reaching out and touching the picture. She looks up at Mulder and nods.

 **3.**  They leave almost immediately. They argue, first, about whether or not Mulder should go—she is insisting  _absolutely not_ , that he is still recovering, and he is insisting that he will not let her go alone—but they finally just end up going together.

The address is somewhere in rural Virginia, reminding her of the facility she found Mulder in a couple months ago. The drive is nearly an hour. Scully drives, full of nervous energy. She feels a little sick to her stomach, thinking of all the years that have passed since they lost Melissa, all the years she may have been alive and in captivity. She hasn’t called her mom or Bill yet because she genuinely has no idea what she would say to them. What if it isn’t true? What if it isn’t true?

Mulder keeps a hand on her knee most of the way there, a comforting hand. He’s her rock, silent and supportive, and she’s suddenly glad that he insisted on coming with her. She wouldn’t want to do this alone.

The address ends up being a dark little one-story building tucked into farmland and surrounded by a large chain-link fence. Scully draws her gun almost immediately at the sight of it, her hands tensing as if she’s going to want to hit someone.

They park a ways away from the facility, in the shadows. Mulder has bolt cutters sitting on his lap, and he rubs her knee one more time before reaching up to touch her shoulder. “You okay?” he asks softly.

She works her jaw back and forth. “I don’t know, Mulder. I really don’t,” she says softly, and feels his hand on her back, rubbing up and down her spine. She looks up at him, as grateful as she is apprehensive, upset. “Are you ready?” she asks, and he nods. They climb out of the car.

He uses the bolt cutters to cut a small opening in the fence. There are security cameras mounted on poles nearby, but Scully thinks that they are dead. No flashing lights, no sign of working. She’s halfway hoping whoever left the photo is working on their side; if Mulder and Melissa don’t make it out of here tonight, she’ll never forgive herself.

Mulder pulls aside the chain link aside and holds it for her as she climbs in, slipping in after her. They slip across the lawn to a door they find locked, and as Mulder is picking the lock, Scully is considering the absurdity of this all. They are the least covert they’ve ever been right now, perhaps; how could they  _not_  be caught? What if this is a trap, what if none of this is real? She takes a shaky breath and braces her shoulders against the cinder block walls, holding her gun protectively before her. She’s so tense that she jumps a foot when Mulder touches her shoulder and motions to the open door.

Inside is a long, empty corridor with rows and rows of doors. Scully looks down at the back of the photo, where a number is written below the address:  _57_. She taps below the number with one finger, and Mulder nods. They begin to move down through the rows of rooms, labeled like apartments, all in the twenties and thirties. Scully curses under her breath. They reach the end of that hall and round a corner to run smack into a startled guard.

“Who the hell a—” the man begins, already reaching for his gun, but Scully beats him to it. She smacks him hard on the temple with the butt of her gun, and he goes down, unconscious by the time his head smacks hard on the floor. She bends down to confirm that he is still alive with an air of disgust, the same disgust she sees on Mulder’s face when she rises back up. They step around the man and keep moving.

They move through a hall with more numbers, Scully mentally counting until they reach it. Door 57. Her heart in her throat, she tries the door handle to no avail. Mulder moves past her to pick the lock, and she presses a hand to her forehead, breathing uneasily. She has no idea what will be on the other side of that door. She’s thinking of the funeral again, of the coffin and the flowers and the way her mother sobbed. How has she failed her family this long, by never investigating whether or not Melissa was alive? All these years Melissa’s been held captive, and she’s never came looking for her. If it’s even real, if she’s even alive. This is the moment of truth, and Scully feels like she’s going to throw up.

She hears the door swing open, and she turns towards the door in a rapid motion, pushing through into the small room.

The dim light falls across the bed, across the figure there, who sits up quickly with her hands held up protectively. It is Melissa. It’s Melissa, and her eyes widen at the sight of Scully. Scully herself feels faint.

“Dana?” Melissa says in a small voice, and it makes Scully think of when Missy fell off of her bike when she was nine and Dana was seven, and she’d looked just like that, afraid and in pain.

Dana nods. She collapses onto the bed and hugs her sister tightly.

 **4.**  They make it out. Somehow, they make it out. Melissa is wobbly and weak, and ends up leaning on Mulder on the way out. (She hugs Mulder, too, right off the bat, extraordinarily grateful to the both of them.) But they slip out to the car with no mishaps, Melissa and Scully climbing into the backseat. As they get settled, Scully leans across and hugs her sister again. After years of loss and mourning and losing leads, here she is. She’s thin under her arms, worryingly so, and she still looks weak, but she’s okay and whole and alive.

Missy hugs her back tightly. “Thanks for coming to get me, Day,” she whispers in her ear, and it is very hard not to cry.

The first thing that Melissa asks is what year it is. Scully finds herself unable to speak, so Mulder offers it up, gingerly. Shock flickers over Melissa’s face before a grim sort of acceptance comes in to replace it. “I thought it might be something like that,” she says in a soft voice, squeezing Scully’s hand.

She tells them that she woke up in that facility a couple of weeks ago. Aside from that, she remembers nothing since the gunshot, falling in Scully’s doorway. “I guess I’ve been in a coma,” she says softly, solemnly, and Scully wipes a tear away. She’d never wanted her own experiences to occur for her sister. She sees Mulder wince in the front seat, and wonders if he is thinking of the same thing.

Melissa doesn’t say much about the two weeks she’s been awake—although neither of them can blame her. Mulder says nearly nothing in the front seat as he drives, and Scully doesn’t prod. Doesn’t want to.

She tells Melissa about the past few years in the most delicate way that she can. “We thought you were dead,” she says briefly, and Melissa lays a head on her shoulder like they were children again, like the way she’d done after Dana’s own abduction.

 _How did you find me,_  she says, and Scully tells her about the photograph. Melissa laughs in a dry, humorless little way. “Thank you for coming for me,” she says again. “Thank you so much.”

“Of course,” Scully chokes out. “I-I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

Melissa shakes her head. Won’t accept the apology. She begins to prod Scully with more questions, questions about Mom and Bill and Charlie. Scully stumbles over her answers, not wanting to tell her of the worst parts—of Emily, of the fact that they don’t talk to Charlie anymore. She tells her instead about Matthew, their nephew, about the escapades from last Christmas, about every story she can think of from the past four years that isn’t sad or horrible and violent. She tells her about a few of her cases with Mulder, even. Anything that sounds happy. Melissa even laughs a few times. She catches Mulder’s eye in the rearview mirror more than once, and he looks almost grateful. Like he’s thinking,  _At least one of us got our sister back._

When he stops to get gas, getting out of the car, Melissa turns to her, the mischievous look on her face muted but still fully there, and whispers, “So have the two of you sealed the deal yet?”

“ _Missy_ ,” Scully says in instinctive horror, before she remembers that it’s been years since she’s been scandalized and embarrassed by her big sister. It feels so normal it almost feels wrong.

She shrugs. “It’s been four years, Danes. It’s a valid question.”

Four years. Four years lost. The reminder still hurts. Scully says (quietly, because Mulder is just outside pumping gas), “It’s complicated. I’ll tell you later, okay?”

Missy grins. It’s a wobbly grin, but it’s still her. She pushes hair behind her ear with a trembling hand. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

 **5.**  They go back to her place. All three of them, because they still have no idea whether or not the people who took Melissa will be coming for them. Melissa pales a little when they cross the threshold, but she shakes her head and pushes through the door.

Scully insists she take the bed. “I can sleep on the couch,” she says, and Melissa raises her eyebrows at Mulder, who is sitting on the couch. Scully shakes her head firmly, showing her the bedroom even though Melissa knows perfectly well where it is. “You need to get some rest, Missy,” she adds, straightening the covers. “I know you must be exhausted… You should see a doctor tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to see a doctor,” Melissa says grouchily, opening a drawer in her dresser. “Aren’t you a doctor, Dana?”

“I’m a pathologist. We don’t know what kind of health you’re in…” She’s stumbling over her words. “… after everything that’s happened…”

“I’m fine, Dana, really.” Melissa draws a pair of scissors out of the drawer and sits down on the edge of the bed. She meets Scully’s eyes seriously, says, “I just want things to go back to normal. Although…” She laughs bitterly, combing through her long hair with her fingers. “I don’t know what kind of normal there  _is_  after you’ve been dead for four years. What’s there to do now?” Her fingers snag on a knot and she winces.

“Here…” Scully hands her a comb, which Melissa takes gratefully. “We can call Mom in the morning,” she adds guiltily. She doesn’t know if she can offer her sister any other  _normal_  besides their family. “And Bill, and Charlie… I-I haven’t called them yet, but we can call them tomorrow. First thing.”

“Okay.” Melissa is concentrated on combing through her hair, wincing at the pull of the tangles. “I-I think I really want to see Mom,” she says with a little self-deprecating laugh. “Bill and Charlie, too, but… I’ve really missed Mom. I never thought I’d be needing my mom so bad now, since I’ve grown up, but… I do.”

“She’s going to be so happy to see you,” Scully says, her hands knotted in her lap. “Bill and Charlie, too. And Matthew… he’s so sweet. He looks just like Billy did growing up.”

Melissa snorts, pulling hard at the comb. “Poor kid,” she says with a smirk.

Scully laughs. She feels like she’s going to cry all over again. “I have pictures,” she says, “if you want to see them.”

Melissa nods. “I would,” she says softly. She gathers her long hair at the nape of her neck, holding it back in one tail, and reaches back with the scissors, chopping it off in one fluid motion. Scully recognizes what she’s doing, the same thing she’s always done: she’s taking back her own life, cutting away the parts that she cannot control. Melissa runs her fingers through her chopped hair, pulling it down over the scar on her forehead, before she looks to Scully. She bites her lower lip. “Sorry about all the hair on your bed,” she says.

Scully’s throat grows thick with grief. “It’s okay,” she says. She gulps, her head bent forward. “I’ve really missed you, Missy,” she whispers. “I’ve really, really missed you.”

“Aw, Danes,” Melissa tries to crack, but the joke falls flat. “Hey, Danes.” She reaches out to pat her hand. “I missed you too, Dana,” she says, her voice deep and sincere. “I missed you, too.”


End file.
